Even as an Oregon teenager spent the last 17 months in foster care, his Department of Human Services' caseworker made little or no attempt to discover that his biological mother lives two hours away in Tacoma.

And 10 days after the Columbia County court hearing in which this was disclosed, DHS had yet to reach out to Lillian Hagge, who has not seen her son since he was 3 years old.

"The state of Oregon still hasn't contacted me," Hagge said. "The only reason I know what happened is because of the lady from CASA."

That would be Kathryn Bourn, who runs the Court Appointed Special Advocate office in St. Helens. Bourn said the caseworker arrived at the March 11 hearing before Circuit Court Judge Jenefer Grant without a number of documents, including the teenager's birth certificate.

"I was able to get that by the end of the day," Bourn said. "I was able to locate his probable parents and the legal proceedings by the next day.

"This is something DHS could have done within 17 months."

The teenager in question was placed in foster care in October 2011, prompting the shelter hearing that brought CASA volunteers on board.

At that point, DHS policy requires that child protective service workers "make diligent efforts to identify legal parents and putative fathers." The agency playbook is explicit that those efforts should include "ordering the child's birth certificate."

This case helps to explain why that's necessary.

In early 2001, Hagge says, she and the boy's father had a violent parting when she told the guy she was leaving him.

The situation was so volatile, Hagge says, that when her sister, Joann, suggested she take temporary charge of the 3-year-old to keep him safe, Hagge agreed.

"A month after I gave her temporary custody, she moved to Oregon," Hagge said. "I didn't have the finances to look for him. I couldn't find her any place. No phone number, no nothing."

The boy remained with his aunt until 2011, when he went into foster care. Joann reportedly gave conflicting accounts about why the teenager was living with her.

It's not unusual, said Bourn -- a family law attorney in Astoria for 11 years -- "for people to have a quasi-legal arrangement on the custody of children."

That's precisely why a caseworker is obligated to independently verify the identity of parents and other family members:

"If you don't work with a parent," Bourn said, "you are cutting that child off from the possibility of being unified with others in the extended family."

If either Hagge or her son's birth certificate were located 17 months ago, both had disappeared from his DHS file before his permanency hearing in St. Helens two weeks ago.

Hagge's parental rights were never terminated. What's more, non-custodial parents must be notified when a child is sent into foster care.

When I called DHS seeking an explanation, spokesman Gene Evans said nothing would be available before Tuesday.

Bourn understands that caseworkers in the child welfare system are under severe strain:

"Their workload has increased dramatically. They are hopping from crisis to crisis. As appalled as you and I may be by this case, they are dealing with things that are even more appalling."

But Bourn is also alarmed at how unresponsive DHS has been in this case, even as she notified supervisors and agency heads of the issues at stake.

"It has taken much more time and effort," she said, "to get a response from DHS to CASA -- a legal party to the case -- than it took me to obtain the child's birth certificate, find out the child's legal status in terms of non-parental custody proceedings in the state of Washington, and to track down and contact his mother."

As Bourn reminds us, "This is not an aberration." It is a vicious circle: Caseworkers devote less and less time to each harrowing file. Oversights like this one increase. Children remain in the system instead of finding that "forever home." And the DHS burden grows heavier.

The agency deserves our sympathy ... but not as much of it as the teenager who spent another 17 months just beyond his mother's reach.